Mr. Ely. Did you get the feeling that she hadn't enjoyed herself when she was with him?
Mr. Donovan. I got that impression. But I think that they didn't share any common interest. I think he was truly interested in international affairs, and that is not typical of her or other stewardesses I have known.
Mr. Ely. Do you recall the circumstances under which Oswald left the Marine Corps?
Mr. Donovan. Yes; I do.
Mr. Ely. Could you relate them to us, please?
Mr. Donovan. I recall that he got a hardship discharge. We offered to get him a flight—that is a hop from El Toro to some place in Texas, his home. He refused. We considered that normal in that if you take a hop you sacrifice your transportation pay. We offered to take him to a bus or train station. He refused. But that is not particularly unusual, either.
I recall that he was gone for some period of time, and shortly before I got out of the Marine Corps, which was mid-December 1959, we received word that he had showed up in Moscow. This necessitated a lot of change of aircraft call signs, codes, radio frequencies, radar frequencies.
He had the access to the location of all bases in the west coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons, number and type of aircraft in a squadron, who was the commanding officer, the authentication code of entering and exiting the ADIZ, which stands for Air Defense Identification Zone. He knew the range of our radar. He knew the range of our radio. And he knew the range of the surrounding units' radio and radar.
If you had asked me a month after I left that area, I could not have told you any but our own. Had I wanted to record them, I certainly could have secretly, and taken them with me. Unless he intentionally with malice aforethought wrote them down, I doubt if he would have been able to recall them a month later, either.
Mr. Ely. You recall that various codes were changed. Now, at what level were these changed? Was this an action of your specific unit, or a fairly widespread action?